The Father

It is Father's Day. It is a wonder we are still allowed to celebrate it. Feminism long ago identified the enemy it wished to destroy as patriarchy - "father authority". Today, feminism is triumphant, and patriarchy, despite Steven Goldberg's thesis, (1) is all but dead. Perhaps the iconoclasts presently engaged in tearing down history have not gotten around to Father's Day yet. Or perhaps the feminists are satisfied with having stripped fatherhood of its essential meaning by destroying its authority and are content to let the vestigial honour remain. The latter suggestion is unlikely. It is not in the nature of feminism or any other leftist movement to refrain from utterly humiliating and debasing its defeated foes.

The feminist assault on the authority of earthly fathers is and always has been ultimately aimed at the highest fatherly authority of all, that of God. Feminism, like the anti-racism (actually "anti-white" racism) that has recently exploded into a tsunami that threatens to sweep away all of Western Civilization, has historically come in both "liberal" and "radical" (far Left or Marxist) forms, of which the radical, in both cases, is now in the ascendancy, but liberal and radical alike are descended from the Puritan rebels of the seventeenth century, the Whigs, and as Samuel Johnson famously put it "the first Whig was the devil." There is much in the way of witty and wise comebacks to feminism which can be gleaned from the words of Dr. Johnson, by the way, despite the fact of it not yet having been in its infancy when he walked the streets of London. His conversation with the bluestocking Mrs. Knowles as recorded by Boswell is one example. His words to Dr. Taylor "Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little" are another. A paraphrase of the latter is the conclusion to which Stephen Leacock argued in "The Woman Question", written in 1915 on the eve of women's suffrage - and Prohibition - but still, in my opinion, the best commentary on the women's movement ever written. Feminism is not actually the subject of my essay, however, so lest it be permanently sidetracked I shall give one more quotation, this time from Fran Lebowitz who said "Women who insist upon having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong silent type" and move on to the Fatherhood of God.

In the early stages of liberalism's "long march" through the Churches, it looked like the Fatherhood of God was all that they intended to leave intact of orthodox Christian doctrine. In reality, this was misleading, not because the Modernists were more orthodox than they seemed, but because they had reduced the Fatherhood of God to a single facet, that which corresponds to the "universal brotherhood of man." This is a Scriptural aspect of the Fatherhood of God, to be sure, but it is not the whole of it. Indeed, the most unequivocal statement that all people are the children of God in all of Scripture is to be found in St. Paul's address to the Stoics and Epicureans at Mars Hill in Acts 17. In the twenty-eighth verse of the chapter he quotes first from Epimenides of Crete, then from either Aratus of Soli or Cleanthes of Assos. It is the second quotation, which, ironically, regardless of which of the two Stoic philosophers who both said it that the Apostle had in mind, was originally addressed to Zeus, that asserts that we are all God's offspring. Ordinarily, the Scriptures speak in terms of "Creator" and "creation" - or "creature" in the older English - to refer to this aspect of God's Fatherhood, and it is not what was highlighted in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Ironically, the same liberals who seemed bent on reducing the Christian kerygma to the Fatherhood of God, and the Fatherhood of God to this one aspect of it, also embraced the theories by which Darwin and others sought to explain the existence of man without God, thus undermining the fragment of Christian faith to which they still clung. Today, the "Fatherhood of God" is no longer in vogue among liberal theologians due to its gender specificity. It has become far too common to hear gender neutral re-formulations of the Trinitarian benediction such as Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, although this is not as bad as the "Father/Mother" stuff that pops up in certain circles.

In Christian dogmatics and systematic theology (2) the subcategory of Theology Proper that pertains to God the Father is called Patriology or sometimes Paterology, never Patrology which is a less common synonym for Patristics, that is, the study of the writings of the Fathers of the Church. It is the counterpart of Christology and Pneumatology. Often dogmaticians and theologians willl omit Patriology, not because they regard the Father as being of less importance than the Son and Holy Ghost but because they find it much harder to distinguish this part of Theology Proper from the whole. The very first thing the Apostles' Creed affirms is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Similarly, the Nicene Creed begins with "I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible." It is the full deity of the Son and the Holy Ghost that the Church Fathers had to defend against the heretics, not the deity of the Father. The closest thing to a heretical attack on the deity of the Father was the Gnostic, especially Marcionite, attempt to distinguish the Father from the Old Testament Jehovah and equate the latter with their concept of an evil demiurge. The expansion of the opening affirmation of the Apostles' Creed into that of the Nicene was the Nicene Fathers' answer.

Jesus explicitly identified His Father as the Old Testament Jehovah in John 8:54 "it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God." In the Old Testament, Fatherhood is frequently used to denote the relationship between Jehovah and national Israel. The most striking example of this is in the fourth chapter of Exodus. Here, after He has finally persuaded Moses to go to Pharaoh and speak for Him, and Moses has taken leave of his father-in-law and gotten ready to return to Egypt, God tells him that after he has performed all the signs and Pharoah has still refused to let Israel go, he, Moses, is to say "Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn." (vv. 22-23) Here the contest between Jehovah and Pharaoh is set up as the King of Kings, demanding the release of the son whom a lesser king holds hostage, and obtaining that release only through taking the firstborn of the lesser, rebellious, king. In the New Testament, of course, we find that all of this foreshadowed what would take place on the last Passover of the old age. Again, the King of Kings would demand that a lesser, rebellious, king, in this case Satan, would release his captives, in this case the entire world held in bondage through sin. Here, however, God does not obtain the release through the death of the rebel's son, but through the sacrifice of His Own, His Only-Begotten Son, whereby all those who are so set free - redeemed, in the literal sense of the term - are elevated to sonship through adoption.

In all of this, multiple facets of God's Fatherhood can be seen. It means one thing when we say that God is Father of all and that we are "all his offspring." This means basically that God is our Creator Who continues to care for us as His creation. It means another thing when the Scriptures say that God is the Father of Israel and that Israel is His "first-born son", to which image from Exodus, the rest of the Old Testament, especially the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, makes frequent reference. This is a metaphorical way of denoting the more intimate relationship that existed between God and Israel than between God and the general world, It possibly also, although this is not explicitly spelled out, includes an allusion to the circumstances by which Israel came into being (that Abraham had physical descendants at all was due to the direct miraculous intervention of God). It means yet another thing for God to be the Father of Jesus Christ. In the previous senses, the "Fatherhood" of God applies to all Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, with special reference to the First Person only through appropriation in the theological sense of the term. When we speak of God as the Father of Jesus Christ, however, we are referring to an internal relationship within the Trinity. It is paradoxically the most literal and the most metaphorical sense in which God is Father. Jesus is the "Only-Begotten Son" of the Father, meaning the Only Person of Whom it can be said that He is God's Son in the most literal sense of a Son Who comes from the Father naturally and so shares His own nature. (3) Yet this is metaphorical because the "begetting" or "siring" referred to is not the physical act, requiring a mother, and taking place within time so as to have a before and after. The Son comes from the Father and shares the Father's nature, but to share the Father's nature is to be eternal, with neither beginning nor end, and so the begetting of the Son is also eternal. It means yet another thing for God to be the Father of those who have been redeemed by Christ. The Scriptures speak of this in terms both of regeneration and adoption. God is the Father of the redeemed by regeneration in that through the working of the Holy Spirit He imparts new spiritual life to people who had been born spiritually dead through Original Sin. He is the Father of the redeemed through adoption because He joins the redeemed to His Son in the mystical Body of His Church in which they share in the privileges of the Sonship of the Head.

Taken together, these facets show the many ways in which God is Father, a truth about God so basic that it is the first and most fundamental affirmation of the Creeds.

The enemy of God, through his earthly feminist agents may attack the authority of earthly fathers, aiming through them at that of God the Father, but the latter he can never overthrow. This is how we know that feminism, seemingly triumphant in our own day, is ultimately a defeated foe.

Thanks be to God.

Happy Father's Day


(1) Steven Goldberg was chair of the Department of Sociology at City College of New York until he retired about twelve years ago. He was one of the very few in his discipline to be a true scientist rather than an agent of Marxist indoctrination. In his The inevitability of Patriarchy (1973), later expanded into Why Men Rule (1993), he argued that human nature made the abolition of patriarchy impossible. Note, however, that he was not using "patriarchy" in the root sense of "father authority" but in the sense of males being on average higher up the heirarchy of power and status than females.


(2) Dogmatics is the exposition of the articles of faith contained in the ecumenical Creeds and, for the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation, their particular Confessions. Systematic theology is the complement to Biblical theology, the latter examining doctrine in its Scriptural context, the former organizing it according to theme or topic. In practice, dogmatics and systematic theology are virtually identical. Francis Pieper's Christian Dogmatics (Lutheran) is the same type of work as Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology (Presbyterian/Reformed). The categories into which both assign doctrines are indistinguishable.

(3) The Holy Ghost also shares The Father's nature but not as a Son. Spirit, in Hebrew and Greek, is the same word as breathe. Jesus is the Son of God through His eternal begetting, the Holy Ghost is the breathe of God.

Patriphobia

Once again it is Father’s Day and once again I am both pleased and moderately surprised that we are still allowed to celebrate it, that it has not been cancelled, banned, or renamed as outdated, sexist, and completely unacceptable to the progressive, forward thinking, spirit of the day. For the spirit of the day is nothing if it is not completely and utterly patriphobic.

You can see this patriphobia everywhere you look. It is there in the way television shows and movies routinely depict fathers as arrogant and incompetent buffoons who are constantly being shown up by their much wiser and humbler wives and children. It can be seen in the misandrist, vaginocentric, readings of literature, culture, and history to which our unfortunate students are subjected in the halls of higher learning and which are becoming more and more ubiquitous in primary and secondary education as well. It is clearly there in how we have been re-writing and re-interpreting our laws and administering our social programs in such a way so as to render fathers a superfluous and perhaps even unwanted appendage to the reduced nuclear family of mother and children.

Sadly, it can also be seen in much purportedly pro-fatherhood material put out by well-meaning Christian groups. Such groups, in response to the alarming increase in fatherless families over the last few decades, rightly wish to promote fatherhood. The problem is that they often uncritically accept the feminist narrative in which the blame for the fatherless family is placed entirely upon the failure of men to face up to their responsibilities as fathers.

To be sure this is a part of the problem. It is far from being the whole story, however. It is hardly fair to say that fathers who have been barred from having any contact with their children by vindictive mothers backed by sympathetic courts – and there are more than a few of these – are all “deadbeat dads” who refuse to grow up and face their responsibilities. Furthermore, while it would be wrong to excuse fathers who do shirk their responsibilities it must be pointed out that the hostility of the present cultural climate to fathers and fatherhood is a strong disincentive to assuming that role and those responsibilities. Yet more often than not it is the same individuals and groups that have done the most to generate this toxic patriphobic atmosphere who try to place the entire blame for the growing epidemic of children being raised without their fathers upon paternal abandonment.

This all started several decades ago when marriage law was rewritten to facilitate divorce. Marriages, in which a man and a woman solemnly vow to be forever loyal and faithful to one another, are traditionally alliances between families and sacred covenants blessed by the church. For everyone involved, couple, families, and church, marriage was intended to be a permanent union and the law of the land was expected to support and uphold that, rather than to provide an easy way out. Until very recently, to get a divorce you had to sue your spouse and prove that the marriage had been broken by infidelity and even then the culture strongly encouraged you to try and work things out rather than seek a divorce.

This changed after the Second World War when the civil authorities of Western countries came under pressure to streamline and expedite the divorce process. In the forefront of the various groups clamouring for easy divorce was the feminist movement. The feminists made their demand for easy divorce on the grounds that an escape route was necessary for women trapped in abusive relationships. Feminist ideology, however, would suggest that there was a deeper motivation. Feminism was and is strongly antagonistic towards marriage and family, its aversion being based upon a Marxist reading of the history of the relationship between the sexes as one of an oppressor class (men) and an oppressed class (women). Marriage and the family were regarded as instruments of this oppression, despite it being quite evident that if there was any oppression in these traditional family arrangements it went in the opposite direction, and it is telling that the feminists chose to call the societal structure and arrangements they opposed, the patriarchy, a term which denotes the authority and rule of fathers. The feminists did not think much of motherhood either, regarding domesticity as yet another tool of the male oppression which thwarted the clear intentions of destiny that all women be CEOs and cabinet ministers , and insisting that women be given unlimited access to abortion and state-funded daycare. There is one exception to feminism’s generally anti-mother attitude, however, and that is when the interests of the mother come in conflict with those of the father after divorce.

With the introduction of easy, no-fault, divorce, came the dilemma of what to do about the children of broken families. The feminists insisted that custody should be awarded to the mother, along with alimony and child support payments that were often not easy for the father, who now had to maintain himself in a separate home from his children and former wife, to pay. If the father failed to make the payments he would be cut off from all access to his children. The courts, in part motivated by the vestigial traces of chivalry, tended to agree with the feminists.

So many fathers now found themselves exiled from the lives of their children after their wives obtained easy divorces and full custody of the children with expenses that were more difficult to meet now that separate establishments were involved. If they failed to meet these costs their vindictive ex-wives would refuse to let them see their children and would often try to poison the relationship between the fathers and their children by badmouthing the former to the latter, telling them what a “loser” and a “deadbeat” their father is. To make matters worse, the feminists had also demanded that the authorities clamp down on domestic violence, which was and is certainly a real problem, but one of which the feminists painted an exaggerated, distorted, and extremely one-sided picture. Today, feminists continue to cling to the idea that domestic abuse is always or almost always male-on-female, despite the fact that this idea has been thoroughly debunked and women have been shown to be just as likely – some studies suggest more likely – to initiate violence as men. The courts, however, accepted the picture painted by the feminists and, again perhaps motivated by a vestigial chivalry that refuses to consider the possibility of manipulative deception or anything less than spotless purity on the part of a woman, developed a presumption of guilt against any man accused of violence towards his wife and children. Thus, if an ex-wife was feeling especially vindictive, she could accuse the father of her children of abuse and obtain a restraining order against him which would effectively ban the father from his children’s lives upon threat of jail time without having to provide any substantial evidence. The very threat of making such an accusation became a weapon in her hands.

The injustice of all of this has been challenged by the father’s rights movement since the 1980s and many corrections to it have been made. Unfortunately, the system towards which we are moving in which divorced parents have equal shared custody and equal access to their children, while better than the one in which children are pawns in a battle between warring exes is not a step back towards what we really need, a system where the culture and law again support marriage and the family. For children need both their father and their mother, and not separately, but together. Likewise our society needs a culture that honours and respects fathers, rather than alternating between mocking them as buffoons and preaching at them over their shortcomings.

Happy Father’s Day.

Fatherhood versus Feminism

Children of both sexes need both a father and a mother. I do not mean that a child will die if deprived of either parent, the way a person will die if deprived of air, water or sustenance. I mean that the most important lessons a child must learn on the path to adulthood are not those taught in schools or, heaven forbid, by peers or television, but rather those which they can only be taught by their parents. Some of these lessons can only be taught by a mother. Others can only be taught by a father. Some of the lessons a mother teaches are learned by children of both sexes alike, and this is true of the lessons a father teaches as well. There are other lessons which only a mother can teach a daughter, and only a father can teach a son, just as there are lessons which a daughter must learn from a father and a son from a mother.


It is from a father that a son learns how to be a man, a husband, and a father, partly by instruction, but mostly by seeing these things modelled in his own father. Similarly it is from a mother that a daughter learns how to be a woman, a wife, and a mother. It is from their parent of the opposite sex that children learn about the sex other than their own, form their basic image of that other sex, and learn how to love, respect, and relate to members of that other sex. This process may go wrong, and they may develop a badly skewed image of and way of relating to the opposite sex based upon a bad relationship with their own father/mother, but it is almost certain that it will go wrong in the complete absence of a parent of the opposite sex.

What I have just pointed out has been obvious to everyone since the dawn of time. It is controversial to say it, however, in this day and age. There are many progressives who would like to see people who point out this sort of thing thrown in jail. They consider it to be hate speech. It is generally the sort of things that have been true and obvious since the beginning of time that are considered to be hate speech by progressives.

So what do progressives have against this particular set of true and obvious observations?

What they object to is the truth that in the upbringing of children of either sex there is no substitute for either a father or a mother. This truth contradicts one of their beloved fantasies – the idea that you can substitute two women, two men, the State, or practically anything you want, for a father and mother, without having any adverse effect upon the children This fantasy is the basis of a number of progressive stances including their idea that homosexual couples have an inalienable, natural right to adopt children and that it is oppression far worse than anything and everything dreamed up by Pharaoh, Herod, Caligula, Nero, Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, to deny them this right.

That, however, is not the issue I wish to discuss here and I mention it mostly to poke fun at the absolute inanity of the ridiculous things progressives get uptight over.

Let us return to the point we started with: all children need both a father and a mother. There have always been children who have had to grow up without one or the other due to unavoidable circumstances, such as the death of a parent. These are situations that families, hopefully with the support of extended kin and community, have to deal with as best as they can. Today, however, there are a large number of children who have to grow up without one of their parents because that parent has either chosen to abandon the duties of parenthood or has been prevented from fulfilling those duties by the other parent. In the largest number of these cases the absent parent is the father.

This is a major social problem. This trend can be found among all classes of society and in every class it hurts the children affected but it is even more devastating among the poorer classes where it is a significant contributing factor to multi-generational poverty.

Usually when this problem is recognized and attempts are made to deal with it the focus is upon the fathers who have voluntarily abandoned their duties. While this part of the problem does deserve attention it is not what I wish to focus on here. Rather I wish to address the other part of the problem, fathers who are prevented fulfilling their duties as fathers, by the mothers of their children.

As with so many other problems that beset us in this day of rampant egalitarianism, triumphant liberalism, and social and moral collapse, when we go looking for the root cause we find the ideological movement known as feminism.

Feminism is the ideology of the equality of the sexes. It was dreamed up in the nineteenth century by radical intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Friedrich Engels. It helped inspire the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century, but was fully translated into a movement of political and social activism after the Second World War by such colourful individuals as Simone de Beauvoir, an existentialist novelist, Betty Friedan, a Marxist journalist masquerading as a normal suburban housewife, and Gloria Steinem, whose previous career included such highlights as waiting on tables in a skimpy bunny outfit in one of Hugh Hefner’s clubs and working for a CIA front.

Feminism is the implacable enemy of motherhood, which, in turn, is the implacable enemy of feminism. Motherhood, far more than any “male power structure” or “old boys’ network”, is the major impediment to feminism achieving its dream of a world in which males and females are equally represented on every rung of every ladder – social, political, and economic. This dream is unattainable as long as women keep getting pregnant, carrying their children to term, giving birth to them, and nursing and raising them. Feminism, therefore, has done everything in its power to smash motherhood. It has promoted birth control, abortion, and the transfer of the raising of children to state institutions.

Despite all of these efforts, women are still giving birth to, loving, and raising their children. Motherhood has been battered, but it has withstood the assaults of feminism. Ironically, it is fatherhood that has taken a much heavier hit from feminism.

There is a reason for this. Feminism, in its crusade to obtain what it regarded as fair treatment for women, identified the patriarchal family as the source of all injustice towards women and set out to dismantle the laws, mores, and traditions which supported the patriarchal family. These laws, mores, and traditions, however, and the patriarchal family which they upheld, were the foundation upon which fatherhood stood.

Both fatherhood and motherhood involve much more than the mere biological production of offspring. Indeed, the biological production of offspring is not an absolutely necessary component of either. The one exception to the rule that there is no substitute for a child’s having both a father and mother is when the child is adopted from birth. The reason this is an exception is because parents who adopt children from birth are not really a substitute for a father and mother – they are a father and mother in everything except the biology. When a man and woman choose to so adopt, they decide together to accept a child born to someone else as their own and love and raise that child accordingly. When this happens each parent in the adopting couple is fully aware that they are accepting someone else’s child as there own and that their partner is doing the exact same thing.

Thus adoptive parents avoid a difficulty that can cause problems for natural parents. That difficulty is that, until the very recent development of accurate paternity tests, a mother knew with absolute certainty who her children were but a father had to depend upon the word of the mother. The fear of being cuckolded, of being tricked into raising someone else’s children, down through history has been a powerful force working against fathers accepting their duties, taking responsibility for the children they sired, and shouldering their share of the burden of raising them. That force, however, was held in check by the patriarchal family, and by the laws and traditions which supported it. This, for example, was the reason for the traditional emphasis upon the importance of virginity in a bride. It was not, as the feminists falsely averred, to create a “double standard” so that men could be promiscuous themselves while insisting on purity in their wives. By lessoning the threat of cuckoldry, this tradition promoted responsible fatherhood.

Now paternal uncertainty does not in any way benefit women, although some have been foolish enough to think of it as a weapon to use against the fathers of their children. When a father is not certain that the children he is told are his actually are he is less likely to take his responsibilities as a father seriously, and if he shirks those responsibilities this increases the burden upon the mother, a burden which is already uneven due to nature as it is. Feminism, therefore, in attacking the traditions, laws, and institutions which promote responsible fatherhood as being unfair and oppressive to women, and promoting the kind of behaviour that increases paternal uncertainty and, consequently, irresponsibility, is no friend to the women it purports to speak for.

The feminist movement also considered marriage to be an instrument of oppression for women and so it demanded the liberalization of divorce laws. It campaigned for the laws to be changed so as to greatly expand the grounds for divorce and to provide for “no-fault divorce” in which the court dissolves a marriage without assigning blame to either partner if both consent to the divorce. In each of these campaigns feminism was victorious. Divorce became much easier to obtain, marriages now had less legal protection than the average business contract, and the divorce rates went through the roof.

Once rubber-stamped divorces were readily available the courts had to deal with the problem of what to do with the children of dissolved marriages. Do they give custody to the mother, to the father, or do they split custody equally?

Now this created a dilemma for the feminist movement. If they took the position that custody of the children should be awarded to the mother they would be saying that children belong with their mother which would be tantamount to saying that mothers belong with their children, a truth upon the denial of which the entire feminist movement was built. If, on the other hand, they took the position that custody of the children should be awarded to the father, would they not be handing over the children to the big, bad, patriarchy that they had put so much time and energy into denouncing and combating?

Oh my! Given a choice like that what’s a feminist to do?

Then the feminists got an idea. An awful idea. They had a wonderful, awful, idea. (1)

The courts, the feminists said, should award custody of the children to their mothers. Mothers should have sole custody, with the absolute right to determine what contact, if any a father has with his children, and what influence, if any, he has over them. Their decision would be enforced by the courts and the police. Fathers could still contribute to the raising of their children. In fact they would be made to do so. The court would order them to hand over a sizable percentage of their paycheque to the mother of their children and they would be expected to do so regardless of whether they were allowed any contact with their children or any say in how they are raised.

What if a father could not afford to pay the amount that his ex-wife’s new sugar daddy the judge decided she was entitled to? After all, it is far bigger drain on a man’s resources to support a family he is not living with than to support one he is living with. Well now, he should have thought of that before his wife decided to divorce him, then, shouldn’t he?

It was at this point that a new stock villain was added to the “Most Wanted’ roster, i.e., the “deadbeat dad”. “Deadbeat dad” is an expression that you or I might use to refer to some irresponsible bounder who for entirely selfish reasons, at least as far as we can determine, walks out on his wife, his children, and his duties. On the tongues and lips of feminists, however, and the foolish young women who were convinced by feminism that they could exile the fathers of their children from their homes and lives, and the lives of their children while still laying claim to financial support from those men, it tended to refer to men who objected to the injustice of all of this and defaulted on the payments.

Meanwhile a new generic saint was added to the secular canon, i.e., the “single mom”, who is a rather different character from the widow or abandoned mother.

I say all of this to add some needed perspective to the discussion of fathers who shirk their duties, a discussion that is usually rather one-sided, and do not mean to suggest that the misdeeds of a mother absolve a father from his responsibility to his children or that his contribution to their upkeep should be considered a quid pro quo for the right to see and spend time with his children. Nor do I mean to suggest that things would have been better if the courts had made the awarding of full custody to fathers the default or that there have been no situations where fathers who have been awarded custody have treated the mothers of their children unjustly.

Nor has the legal situation gone unchallenged or completely unamended. Various fathers groups have challenged the system, accused it of bias and discrimination, and demanded that some type of shared custody arrangement be made the default, and the courts have shown varying degrees of sympathy to this.

There is both good and bad in this. It is good that the situation is being slowly adjusted to be less unjust. I say “less unjust” because there can never be a truly just outcome to a divorce and a custody battle. It is not so good that the mens’ or fathers’ movement has been largely organized with the same tactics and same victim mentality as feminism. The last thing we need are yet more groups crying “unfair” and accusing society of discrimination.

Shared custody may be the best way of handling custody after a divorce. That does not mean that it is the best thing for the child. Think back to our initial point. Children of both sexes need both a father and a mother. That is true, but it turns out that something was missing from this statement, so let us revise it. Children of both sexes, need both a father and a mother, who are raising their children together in mutual love and cooperation.

That is something that traditional marriage, the traditional family, and the laws and customs that supported these things could provide children. It is not something that even the fairest of shared custody arrangements can provide. If we are truly concerned about the needs of children, perhaps we need to start asking ourselves how we can make the system support the traditional arrangement again instead of working to undermine it.

Happy Fathers’ Day!

(1) My apologies to Dr. Seuss for the shameless borrowing of his words and to the Grinch for the implied comparison.

The Authority of Fathers

Authority has been in decline in Western civilization for centuries. The liberal dogma of individualism is widely accepted as received truth, despite the many ways in which it conflicts with observable reality. The authority of kings as God’s ministers of justice, the Apostolic authority of the Church, and the authority of all other traditional, social institutions, has been badly eroded. This is true even in the case of the most basic social institution of them all, the family. Parental authority in the family has come under severe attack, an attack which has intensified over the last century. This is especially true of patriarchal authority – the authority of fathers.

God said “Honour thy father and thy mother”. We have dedicated one day of the year each to our parents with which to honour them with our lips. We honour our mothers in May. Now, on the third Sunday of June, it is our fathers turn to have a day of their own. Having “honoured” our parents, we consider our duty to be done, and promptly ignore them for the rest of the year. For some reason I think this is not what God had in mind when He issued the first commandment with a promise.

Much of the blame for the recent decline in respect for fathers and their authority must be laid at the feet of television. The invention of television was a tremendous step in the development of propaganda techniques. It made it possible for moving pictures and accompanying sound to be broadcast throughout a region and viewed by people in their own homes. Television's potential as an instrument of social change was immediately apparent to social engineers and political radicals.

How are fathers usually depicted on television? Does television support the traditional role of the father as an authority figure in the family?

No. If a television program is about a traditional, middle-class, nuclear family, the father figure is typically portrayed as a boorish buffoon, the least intelligent person in the family, who only asserts his fatherly authority when he is obviously in the wrong. If, by chance, television portrays a father differently, that father is usually a sensitive “new male” and a political liberal or the family as a whole is an “alternative family” of some sort.

Can there be any doubt that this is done on purpose to undermine patriarchal authority?

This raises the question of why anyone would want to undermine the authority of fathers, creating instability in the family, leading to social chaos. The fact that someone does is indisputable. The question is why.

The answer to that question ultimately lies in the reason why the authority of the father in the family is important to society. Before we look at that, however, we should note that there is a prominent left-wing movement in society which has historically defined itself in opposition to father-authority. This same movement attacks motherhood as being an inferior choice for women to the pursuit of ambition and self-fulfillment in a professional career outside the home.

This movement is called feminism.

Feminism and Patriarchy


The technical term for the authority of fathers within the traditional family is patriarchy. This word comes from combining the Greek word for father with the Greek word for “rule”. Patriarchy, is the nominal enemy of the feminist movement.

I threw the qualifier “nominal” in for two reasons. The first reason is that what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy” is not what the word actually means. We will return to that momentarily. The second reason is that a good argument can be made that the real enemy of feminism is not patriarchy at all but rather femininity.

If that statement sounds outrageous to you then please bear me out as I attempt to explain what I mean by it. While the feminist movement cloaks its goals in the language of “rights”, “equality”, “dignity” and other such vapid totem expressions (1) its true goal, if we can judge from the positions it takes, the actions it calls for, and the policies it supports, is to eliminate femininity and masculinize women. Feminists accuse their opponents of believing that men are superior to women. This, however, is a classic case of what Dr. Freud called projection. The belief that men are superior to women is in fact the core belief of feminism.

Look, for example, at the absurdly titled “Women’s Liberation Movement” of the 1960’s. This movement demanded a number of things, such as universal government-provided daycare and the full legalization of abortion.

What did feminism hope to gain from such things?

It is the nature of things, that the consequences of sexual intercourse are not divided equally between men and women. A man can walk away from it with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones. This is not true of a woman. Pregnancy occurs within the female body and if a woman becomes pregnant that means nine months of bearing the growing child within her womb, and then, because the child is born dependent, a much longer period of nursing and raising the child.

The traditional way in which society addressed this situation was through moral and civil regulations that demanded that men shoulder their fair share of the burden of raising the next generation. Society demanded that men marry the women who bore their children and that they provide for their wives and children.

Feminism, however, took the radically opposite position that the situation should be alleviated by having government daycare freely available to all mothers and by allowing women to terminate their pregnancies at whim. Thus, a woman would be able to walk away from sexual intercourse with no lasting consequences other than moral and spiritual ones, just like a man.

What clearly lies behind the feminist position here is the idea that it is far better to be a man – to be able to walk away from sex with no baggage – than to be a woman. Therefore in the name of equality, the government must artificially make it possible for a woman to be like a man.

Feminism, which purports to be a serious movement seeking the redress of injustices against women, is in reality little more than a feminine equivalent of the mindset of a poorly raised, hormone-driven, adolescent boy.

There was, of course, another motivation that lay behind feminism’s demand for tax-funded daycare and abortion. If women were allowed to terminate unwanted pregnancies whenever they so desired and to have government institutions raise their children for them, then women could pursue careers outside the home and not be hindered, in competition with men in the workplace, by the burden of raising children.

This, however, just further illustrates my point. Feminism’s idea that finding self-fulfillment in careers outside of the home would be better for women than staying home and being wives and mothers is a manifestation of the idea that men are superior to women. For what was feminism saying here if not that the work men did outside the home in order to support their families, was more meaningful and important, than what women did in bearing and raising children?

In all of this feminism displayed an immature mindset that is only explicable as a counterpart to the irresponsible attitudes that were becoming popular among the male population at the time, brought upon in part by the naïve progressive notion that advances in the development of technology had rendered the maturity and responsibility society demanded of both sexes in the past to be obsolete.

Wisdom is something that people gradually gain as they mature and get older. This is as true of societies as it is of individual persons, and for this reason it is the uttermost foolishness to disregard the accumulated wisdom of the past. Society’s traditional response to the difference between the sexes in natural consequences to sexual intercourse was not based upon the idea that men had gotten the better end of the deal than women. For that idea would itself have to include the idea that it is more desirable to live entirely for yourself and to sleep around with no commitments to anyone than to settle down and raise a family. That is an idea which reflects immaturity and selfishness rather than wisdom. Traditional societies were wisely, more concerned with making men behave maturely, responsibly, and wisely, than making it easier for women to behave immaturely, irresponsibly, and foolishly.

Traditional societies also displayed wisdom in assigning roles to men and women. These roles differed from society to society and at different stages in the development of a particular society in accordance with economic, political, and social circumstances. Whatever the circumstances, however, the difference between the role assigned to men and that assigned to women was centred around the basic fact that women get pregnant and bear children which they give birth to and nourish, and men do not. Societies guided by ancient tradition are too wise to treat this difference as trivial. Whatever else women might do can never be more important to a society than the bearing and raising of the next generation. Therefore, whatever role a society assigns to women, it will be one that does not hinder or interfere with motherhood.

Thus, in a society which survives by hunting and gathering, the role of gathering is assigned to women because it allows them to stay near the camp with the children and the role of hunting is assigned to men. When agriculture becomes the dominant means of survival the roles change to accommodate the new economy as they do again when mercantile trading and industrial manufacturing are developed. These changes affect the kind of labour required of both men and women. What does not change is that the labour required of women is that which least conflicts with motherhood.

Feminists refuse to see the wisdom in this. Instead, they see traditional gender roles, including the roles of father and mother, as a system of societal organization designed to benefit all males by oppressing all women. This is what feminists mean when they use the word “patriarchy”. (2)

Patriarchal authority is essential to Western Civilization

The term patriarchy, however, more accurately refers to the authority of fathers than to a supposed millennia-long conspiracy on the part of all men to oppress all women. The authority of fathers has come under attack, not only from feminists, but from revolutionaries of all stripes. Painter, novelist, and social critic Wyndham Lewis, wrote in the 1930s that the father is the enemy of all revolutionary movements because he “has been cast to represent authority”. (3)

A father’s authority exists and is exercised within the family. The family is the basic building block from which all societies are built. It is the smallest, most organic, form of social organization that exists. Other offices of authority within Western societies tend to be patterned after a father’s authority. Sir Robert Filmer, in his Patriarchia, argued from the authority of fathers to the natural authority of kings.

Wyndham Lewis was therefore correct. The father, as the traditional authority figure in the traditional family, is the embodiment of all traditional authority in Western society and therefore the primary target of those who see traditional Western civilization as standing in the way of progress.

The attack upon patriarchal authority has never been stronger than at the present moment. The current campaign to glorify the single mother is a blatant attempt to declare fathers to be superfluous and unwanted. After traditional motherhood was bashed for decades, as being an inferior, boring option to the glamour of an ambitious career now motherhood is presented to women as an empowering choice – especially if it is out of wedlock and by artificial insemination.

Fathers are not redundant and unnecessary however. Studies have shown what common sense has always told us – that children are happier and far more likely to develop into responsible, law-abiding, socially-integrated adults, if they grow up in a home with both a father and a mother. Sometimes circumstances are such that this cannot be the case but it is madness to encourage women to deliberately have children without a father and to consider a father “optional”. That the deception of the non-importance of fatherhood has been able to spread at all is due to the modern state’s having turned itself into a surrogate husband/father.

Unfortunately there is no strong movement of resistance to these attacks nor any indication that one is about to arise. The “conservative” response to feminism today consists largely of complaints that its original “good” intentions have been de-railed by anti-male radicals or worse, attempts to use feminist ideas to bolster support for military action against the Islamic world. The “men’s movement” is a masculine equivalent of feminism. It is devoted to the idol of equality and speaks only the language of “rights”. Some Christian men’s groups have shown an interest in promoting traditional fatherhood. Many however, seem to be little more than support groups.

It is here that we see the single largest reason for the decline of fatherhood and patriarchal authority in the family and in society. Other than individual voices, both male and female, the traditionalist side has largely given up.

Why has this happened?

Authority and Responsibility

Authority and responsibility always go together. The word “father” describes a position that comes with both authority and responsibility. Traditionally, fathers would raise their sons to follow after them, in both shouldering the burden and responsibility of fatherhood, and exercising its authority wisely.

Responsibility is less appealing than authority, however, and at some point the liberating effect of technological advancement combined with the accumulation of a couple of centuries worth of liberal individualism to undermine the willingness of a great many men to take up the duties and responsibilities and burdens of fatherhood. Many of these still wished to exercise the authority – but found that in abandoning their duties they had given up their authority as well.

John Lukacs wrote:

In the 1960s American women found the predominance of the male fettering not because it was real but because it was unreal. They could not stomach those prerogatives of the male—including not only professional or intellectual prerogatives but also the protection habitually offered by the latter—that dated back to earlier centuries, when men were indeed strong. Now they saw—or, rather felt—that the men were weak. Just as the “revolt” of youth in the 1960s was, in reality, often a reaction not against “authoritarian” but against permissive fathers whom they could no longer respect, women, too, despite all of the silly slogans of “male chauvinism,” reacted against the assumption of strength and power on the part of their male counterparts, who were often weak. To be queen of a house in the times of a constitutional (that is, bourgeois) monarchy was one thing; but who would want to keep up the formal duties and the manifold responsibilities of a queen when the man of the household was but a chairman of a committee? (4)

Fatherhood still represents both authority and responsibility, and it is for that reason that so many men who dislike feminism, do not wish to stand against it from the position of defending traditional fatherhood.

Any other position, however, has already capitulated completely to the enemy.

(1) By “vapid totem expressions” I mean essentially meaningless terms that we are expected to mindlessly genuflect before whenever they are invoked by the enforced, secular, orthodoxy of the day.

(2) The feminists are not the only ones to use the word “patriarchy” to refer to a general system of male dominance. Dr. Steven Goldberg, who was the Professor of Sociology at City College of New York, in his The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Dominance (William Morrow: New York, 1973) later expanded into Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance (Open Court: Chicago, 1993) uses the term patriarchy in a specialized, and therefore carefully defined, sense. He used it to refer to when all or the majority of the upper hierarchical positions in a society are occupied by males – which he argues occurs in every society. He documented the latter point from the studies of anthropologists and provided a theory as to why this was the case. He argued that societies will vary in what roles and positions are awarded the highest status, but that whatever those roles and positions are, men will have a greater interest in obtaining them then women, because men are biologically more aggressive than women. Since women are attracted to men with status, power, and wealth the incentives to compete for the highest positions will always be greater for men than for women.

(3) The quotation comes from The Doom of Youth, published by Robert M. McBride & Company of New York in 1932. This is a polemical collection of essays directed against the cult of youth. It was reissued in 1982 by Haskell House Publishers of New York.

(4) John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2004), p. 196.